Archive for February, 2006

I’m watching the Olympic women’s figure skating. And I think Dick Button is mad that they woke him up from his cryogenic state for these games. Scott Hamilton and whoever that woman is are all “yes!, she’s really enjoying her Olympic experience. She knows she won’t medal, but she’s really going after it.” And “look at her, look at the fire in her eyes, she’s out for redemption.” After which, whoever wasn’t talking says something equally nice, or even maybe says something slightly derogatory, but still sweet like, “I’ve seen her looking better but the pressure of this Olympic ice is intense.” Meanwhile, all night long Dick has been living up to his name by saying things like “Well you’ll forgive me for saying this, but I don’t see any fire, I think she’s a slow, clumsy, out of shape cow. I hope that’s not being mean.” And then there’s this awkward silence while Scott thinks, “man if you weren’t 200 years old and hadn’t skated your Olympics on an outdoor rink in a blizzard, and if I wasn’t afraid your head would completely fall off your body from your recent cryogenics, I’d so hit you now” and the woman is trying to come up with a way to politely disagree but she can’t think of anything to say because he’s Dick Button for God’s sake.

I just don’t think you men realize what we women go through each time we make an appointment at the salon. Our precious, flowing tresses put into the hands of another. If we’re lucky, it’s someone we have grown to trust. But you just never know; even our favorite stylist can have a cold, or be thinking about an upcoming date, or wondering if that really was something alive crawling through the hair of their previous client.

Tonight though, I put my hair, not to mention my heart and self-worth, in the hands of a total stranger. My stylist, Angel, is amazing and I love her with all my heart, but I really wish she would stop having babies, especially twins. It really puts a crimp in my personal style. And I just couldn’t wait any longer, the hair was looking far too long, far too heavy, and–dare I say it–far too gray. Ok so there’s only about 10 grey hairs, but that’s 10 too many.

So it was with some trepidation that I walked into the salon tonight to meet Armand. Who looks just like what you think somone named Armand would look like. Only shorter.

I told him what I had in mind. I told him again what I had in mind. He started cutting. This is always the most anxious time for us, because it always seems like your entire head of hair is now residing on the floor, on Armand’s pinstriped trousers, on your nose. My mantra at this point became “just don’t let it be a mullet,” as hair–my hair–continued to fly. Wanna talk about vulnerability?

There was a pause in the cutting and I opened my eyes, which I had shut when he brought out the razor. “You will look hot like Parrrrrrrrrrrris Hilton,” said Arrrrrrmand. Most of the time when someone says “I gulped” it’s an exaggeration. But not when you look in the mirror at your half-dry hair and realize there is a strong possiblity that you’ve been given an inverse mullet. Hello Mrs. Brady. Hello Scarlett’s hair don’t. But I couldn’t panic yet, the color was still to come.

The color process went much more smoothly, unless you count the overwhelming feeling that the cape was growning increasingly tighter around my neck, but I attribute that to the rising sense of being trapped in a hydraulic chair while a South American midget with a a ponytail and frosted tips hacked at my skull with a pair of pruning shears and was now spreading on some spackle to fill in the holes.

Yet, while Armand was not my Angel, he was a man who knew how to make a blow dryer look like an extension of himself. He whirled and twirled that dryer like a gunslinger. He created body where there was none. He flipped in some ends, he flipped out others. The new darker color he created made my eyecolor really pop. “You’rrrrrrrrrrrre looking verrrrrrrry good, Lorrrrri,” Armand purred, rubbing something called “hair putty” in his palms. And I started to believe him, and continued to believe him while I was writing out a check for an exhorbitant amount and giving Armand 15% of that in cash.

This is a big post. I’ve been writing it in my head for quite a while now. I’ve started to write here it at least twice. In fact, I’m not really sure why I haven’t written about it before, except that you know how it’s just nice sometimes to hold something back and just keep it for yourself?

Anyway…

Once upon a time there was a girl named Lori who had quite an obsession with all things British. One day while at college she saw that the alumni were having a fundraiser selling discounted tickets for a week’s trip to England, hotel and tours included for $599. So she coerced a friend into going with her on her dream trip–during this trip she had made plans to meet some friends she had been talking to online. When Lori met CB for the first time, they had a really special connection. They only got to hang out for two days, but ever afterward she couldn’t remember being happier–even though her bangs were hideous.

Lori’s leaving after two days was harder for him than for her, because she was still on her vacation, headed to meet more friends and have more fun, and he was the one getting left behind. She wasn’t as sensitive to this as she could have been. What did she know at 20?–nothing. She had someone take one last picture, and took off when her friends arrived at the train station to pick her up.

Lori and CB stayed in contact and tried to make it work. But they were just broke kids in college with no idea how hard a long distance relationship was going to be, especially when there was no plans and no money to make plans to see each other again. When they broke up, that wasn’t the stated reason, but Lori truly believes that what the reason was.

After they lost touch, Lori would periodically think about CB and the way she felt when she had been with him. Sometimes she would even wonder if CB was her “meant to be” and she had completely screwed it up. But she had to trust that if he was, they would find each other again somehow.

So when CB made an effort a few months ago to contact Lori, she was skeptical but open–but also determined not to make the same mistakes she had made with her infamous ex. So she’s been closed-mouth about the whole issue to both her friends and her blogosphere because she wants to wait and see what happens. She hasn’t, however, been close-mouthed to CB and has laid everything out for him, including most of the embarrassing conversation some of you will remember that she had with her mother recently. All this so that when he flies into the Philadelphia Airport on

March 1, 2006!!!!!!!

they’ll both have a fair shot at their second chance. Because, you just never know what’s around that bend in the road.

So say you had too much to drink last night. And say you ended up crashing on someone’s couch. And next morning you realized that it would be gross but OK to wear the same jeans to work as you wore yesterday, and a borrowed shirt which you might also have slept in last night…but it came down to the choice of wearing the underwear your wore yesterday or wearing no underwear at all–as there are no stores nearby and you can’t be late for work. What would you do?

I’ve always considered myself to be a pretty strong person in a crisis. I’m a “well what now?” kind of person. When something happens, I take it in, and then immediately start to figure what needs to be done to get through it. I was even that way when my father died. How do we get to mom? Ok, now that we’re here what needs to get done? Of course I had my moments of just utter grief, but my feelings on rising from them were, as I have said, “ok what now?” I never, ever, have broken down to the point where I can’t think of what needs to be done to make things better. But I think that, while this attitude is helpful to the people around me, and it keeps me busy, it doesn’t make anything go away. It’s all sitting up in my attic somewhere.

My mother and I are going to visit my dad’s mother tomorrow, and of course that brings up lots of memories. So it probably shouldn’t be surprising that last night I had an extremely intense dream about my father. Normally I wouldn’t blog about it, even, but I don’t have my journal, and it needs to come out, so this seemed the next likely spot.

In the dream, in the back of my head I knew something had happened to my father that was bad. But he was still here in the dream, and he was having heart problems. I was trying to convince him to go to the doctor. I was a complete and utter mess, sobbing out that face-distorting cry that only comes with despair, because I could not get him to get help. I was pleading with him, “I cannot lose you. I couldn’t bear to lose you. You cannot leave me here, I can not lose you.“I woke up completely spent and more exhausted than when I had fallen asleep. Upon awakening I lost all recollection of what my father’s reaction was to my pleas. I do know that while he was alive he never refused me anything that I needed and he could provide, but that in the dream his heart was hardened in more ways than one.